!How I read news --- agk's diary 5 July 2023 @ 17:01 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 while first daughter reads a book on the potty --- There's an internet conversation about how people get their news, or at least how we get our scrolls on. I guess reddit's afire with moderator turmoil and new fees for api calls. Twitter disabled people viewing tweets who aren't logged in, then dos'd itself. Youtube's locking down its api too I think. Bot scraping of everything for plagiarism by over- hyped predictive text might be the cause or just the excuse. What do I know. On gopher people logged plans for sdf's reddit-like lemmy instance, how to categorize their interests in usenet's hierarchy, relaunching their media bias website, quitting 4chan/hackernews, finding Yandex slurped up gopher content probably to help another LLM transform lots of electricity into a speculat- ive bubble. Someone mentioned rss. The parallel conversation's about news. Where to keep up with it, is it a waste of time, is it mani- pulative propaganda, what news is worth attention. Seems reddit, twitter, and youtube are how lots of people get news. They curate to filter what they want from distractions. One of my hobbies is a project to get my country's national passenger rail company to serve my state with a corridor through my town. Another's watching slow-motion catastrophes unfold. So I read news. For the train project, I found rss feeds for local sections of newspapers and TV news along 400 km of the proposed route and fed them to vore.website. One way to find rss feeds is "view source" and ctrl-f for "rss" or "atom." The result turned out to be a blast to read. Suddenly I'm up to date on triumphs and scandals of city governments, parks departments, county government, local courts, local history, and library events. Sometimes at work, where powershell's openssh and sdf's gateone ssh portal are blocked, I look at my news aggregator in a graphical browser. Thank you reader mode for finding the text on news websites! At home I use a shell alias called news. Uh...let me find it, I'll show you.... $ which news /sdf/bin/arpa/af/a/agk/.local/bin/news $ cat .local/bin/news #!/bin/ksh lynx http://frogfind.com/read.php?a=https://vore.we # Purpose: call frogfind and look at newsfeed. # Use: news I truncated the link to my aggregated news, sorry. You can see I let frogfind preprocess it for a more pleasant view of the aggregator and news sites. Local news is the weirdest and most wonderful news as well as the most useful. We live in local worlds after all. The problem's there's so little of it, only a few stories per locale per week, mostly of the "Local Man Killed" variety. I fixed that. For catastrophe news, I read blogs, mostly Naked Capitalism and Moon Of Alabama. Sometimes less than weekly, sometimes almost daily, depending on free time, fatigue, frustration, whether I'm following any stories. I like news. I don't like getting stuck scrolling, numbly reacting, forgetting everything I stuporous- ly read. Thank God for books and my area's hyper- local radio stations. They do less for scroll-happy dopamine loops; more for fulfilment, long-term integrative learning, ability to think, feel.